Who guides them? How do they land first assignments?

Then living in Cleveland, Suzan Fete was a young actor "who had no desire to be anything else" when theater teacher Tom Fulton suggested she consider directing. But it wasn't until Fete moved to Milwaukee and began acting at Mark Bucher's Boulevard Ensemble Theatre that the seed Fulton had planted began to sprout.

It was 1990, and Bucher had chosen William Luce's "The Belle of Amherst" for the 1991-'92 season. Boldly, Fete approached Bucher and asked if she could direct it. "God bless him," Fete said during a recent phone interview. "He said yes."

"I had nothing — no experience and no understanding of what I was doing," Fete remembered. "I was terrified I'd run out of ideas and be exposed as a fraud. But I didn't, and the experience was wonderful. I loved it."

Almost a quarter-century later and now co-artistic director at Renaissance Theaterworks, Fete just directed "Belle" again to open the 2013-'14 Renaissance season. In January, she'll assist another young director making her own professional debut, as Mallory Metoxen takes the helm in the Renaissance production of Theresa Rebeck's "The Understudy."

Young actors also must live with versions of the terror that once afflicted Fete. But as they move forward — in a production and during their career — they can count on a built-in network of support and direction, thanks to designers dressing them and the stage while directors provide guidance and notes, helping actors find their way through a line and around the set.

But how do new directors get their start? Who guides them when they're the ones in charge? And how do they first land assignments, given that there's no built-in audition process of the sort available to actors?

Getting the work

"You need some sort of door open to you," said Milwaukee Chamber Theatre artistic director C. Michael Wright, during an interview. "That's why more people start out as assistant directors — or start their own companies."

Dennis Johnson, 33, did both. Convinced that his future in theater involved directing rather than acting, he sought out assistant directing assignments. Johnson has served as assistant director to David Frank at American Players Theatre; he has also been an assistant director to Angela Iannone for numerous shows, including productions at Milwaukee Chamber and Renaissance.

Renaissance had been where Iannone made her own professional directorial debut with its production of Euripides' "The Trojan Women" (2002); Johnson followed suit, making his professional directorial debut with the Renaissance production of Lynn Nottage's "Crumbs from the Table of Joy" (2011).

Renaissance jointly produced "Crumbs" with UPROOTED Theatre, of which Johnson is a founding member. As was true for Fete with Renaissance — of which she was a founding member and for which she has done most of her directing — UPROOTED has provided Johnson with a home, giving him opportunities to direct while allowing others to see what he can do.

"As an aspiring director, you need to take the initiative, and you need to recognize that early work may be unpaid," Johnson said during a phone interview. "The tradeoff is experience and exposure, which no paycheck can replace."

But one can't eat prestige; when assisting Frank at APT, for example, Johnson was spending half the week in Spring Green and half in Milwaukee so that he could hold down his day job here. "I was spending money to be there," Johnson said.

Johnson has fond memories of directing "Crumbs," classifying it alongside an early UPROOTED production of Dael Orlandersmith's "Beauty's Daughter" (2009) as the work "I am most proud of so far in my directing career." And he rightly recognizes that Renaissance was taking a gamble in giving him the opportunity.

"In one of the meetings before 'Crumbs' was finalized," Johnson recalled, "one of the Renaissance women mentioned that if an actor is bad in a show, three or four — or 20 — other actors and designers can cover. But that's not true with a director, and we're therefore far less likely to take a chance on a director than we would on an actor."

"It's a Catch-22," Johnson said. "Companies are afraid to hire you unless they see your work. But it's tough to get that experience if you don't get hired."

An infusion of young blood

Like Johnson and Fete, Michael Cotey, 27, found most of his early experience and exposure as a director through a company he helped start: Youngblood Theatre, for which Cotey served as artistic director from its 2009 inception through this past spring. This Friday marks the opening of Cotey's first directorial assignment for Milwaukee Chamber's mainstage season: a production of Wendy MacLeod's "Things Being What They Are."

Cotey, too, started as an actor; unlike Johnson and Fete, he also continues to act regularly. But it was directing that revived his flagging passion for theater. By the time he started directing during his senior year at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cotey was no longer having fun on stage.

"When I was in a show as an actor," Cotey recalled during a pre-rehearsal interview at Milwaukee Chamber, "I would always beat myself up about not being where I should be — not being at performance level. It haunted me, to the point where theater was no longer interesting to me because it had become so heavy."

Having tried his hand at directing with one show at UWM and a one-act play with Pink Banana Theatre Company, what turned Cotey around for good was his direction of Youngblood's lights-out production of Mickle Maher's "Spirits to Enforce" (2010), an imaginative rethinking of Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

Cotey fell in love with directing; he is now applying to graduate school so that he can continue the rapid development that has made his name, in just three short years, among those mentioned in every discussion of young Milwaukee directors to watch.

Among the many things to like in Cotey's work is its variety; he has continually taken on challenges involving scripts and casts outside his comfort zone. His willingness to do so reflects how far he has come from those college days when theater increasingly felt like a burden.

Having capped his Youngblood career with an outstanding production last December of Steve Yockey's "Cartoon," Cotey's packed 2013 schedule has included a thorny play about the hanging of a circus elephant at First Stage Children's Theater, a historical drama revolving around the Alexander Hamilton sex scandal at Illinois Wesleyan University and a prestigious gig as director of Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors" at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival.

"Along the way, the most beneficial lesson I'm learning as a director is that while people look to you for your answers, no one is supposed to know all the answers," Cotey said. "That's why we're in the rehearsal room together. The point is to add multiple perspectives, so that suddenly you have something that wouldn't be there without contributions from multiple individuals."

With just two actors, the Milwaukee Chamber's "Things Being What They Are" is worlds removed from this past summer's "Comedy" — or the other big plays, with numerous moving parts, that Cotey has previously directed.

"No one gets hit, there's no gunfire, no blood, no superheroes and no cartoon characters," Cotey said with a smile, drawing a contrast between "Things" and plays he has directed in the past. "The gymnastics of the piece aren't in the mechanics of how it's presented, but in the through-line of the thoughts and conversation. That's a totally new thing for me."

When Wright asked him last year to direct "Things," Cotey had not yet been tapped to direct at Illinois Shakes, making Wright the first artistic director to entrust Cotey with an assignment as a professional director. But Wright already had a sense by then of what Cotey could do.

"Michael had directed for our Young Playwrights Festival," Wright recalled. "He took this high school writer's work and just nailed it theatrically, in part because he showed such great respect for what was there. That's when I knew that I wanted him to direct a main stage show — it was just a question of what the show would be."

Wright nevertheless admits that he is taking a chance in choosing Cotey to direct "Things."

"To be frank, giving this to Michael was a leap," he said. "I love this play, and I've always thought I would direct it. It's unlike anything Michael has done. So yes, I feel like I've taken a risk, but I feel like we have to take such risks."

Wright has been down this road before. In the same year that Cotey was staging "Spirits," it was Wright who tapped Molly Rhode for her first professional directorial assignment: Milwaukee Chamber's beautiful production of a musical adaptation of Hamlin Garland's "Main-Travelled Roads" (2010).

"Michael Wright has been special to my career growth," Rhode said, during a rehearsal break at Skylight Music Theatre, where Rhode is directing the highly anticipated production of "Les Misérables" that opens Friday.

"Michael was a director of mine at First Stage Children's Theater when I was 16, in 'Caddie Woodlawn.' Michael is the one who answered the phone at Next Act Theatre when I was calling and looking for Milwaukee work after college. I had my first professional audition with Michael, and he made me my first professional job offer. Years later, Michael offered me 'Main-Travelled Roads.'"

Plenty to do

A talented triple threat who has been acting, singing and dancing in Milwaukee for more than two decades, the 36-year-old Rhode certainly didn't need directing to stay busy. But when she auditioned for Southern Methodist University's theater program, she deliberately chose to concentrate on directing and playwriting, even though her interest was in a career as a performer.

"Directing and playwriting scared me, and that was itself informative. I felt that because they made me nervous, I should study them," Rhode said. "Doing so improved my acting, exponentially. It changed my way in. When I act, now, I'm looking at how my character functions as part of a whole. And once you start to see a piece that way, you can't go back."

"What I like about this career in general is the ability to tell a story every night," Rhode continued. "As a director you control the entire sweep and arc of that story."

Even as her acting career flourished upon her return after college to Wisconsin, others saw that Rhode had still more to offer. At Skylight, then-artistic director Bill Theisen was asking her to work with him as an assistant director. And at First Stage, where she was also teaching, artistic director Jeff Frank was asking her to choreograph.

Later in the same theater season in which Rhode made her professional directorial debut with Milwaukee Chamber, she also directed for the first time at First Stage, in a production of "Miss Nelson Is Missing" (2011). A year later she took on Skylight's "The Sound of Music," an aesthetic and box-office triumph that was the best show I saw anywhere in 2012.

Even with all that success, Rhode thought twice before accepting the daunting assignment of "Les Miz," which she describes as the hardest thing she's done in theater. "I knew it would eat up my brain, and I had to think about whether I wanted that," Rhode said. "But ultimately the challenge was too great for me to say 'no.'"

Rhode also knew that she wouldn't need to undertake that challenge by herself.

Even as she acknowledged that a director ultimately must go home and tussle alone at night with a show, Rhode returned repeatedly during our interview to the joyously collaborative nature of directing. As the title suggests, a director must lead. But a good director also knows how to listen, as part of a vigorous give-and-take process.

"You're never alone," Rhode said. "I bring my ideas to the designers to start the ball rolling, their own ideas are immediately mixed in, and we find a common vocabulary. What we wind up with isn't just coming out of my head. There's a lot of brain power."

"I'm also surrounded by mentors in this town," Rhode continued. "If I have an idea I'm wrestling with, I just call somebody up and ask them about it. That's part of the story of how and why one can become a director in this community. I don't know that it could have happened for me anywhere else."

Building a community together

Leda Hoffmann — at 26 both the youngest of the four newer directors interviewed and also the only one of those four without a Wisconsin pedigree — can attest firsthand to how nurturing and supportive Milwaukee can be.

Hoffmann arrived here three years ago to participate in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater's celebrated intern program; Rhode is among that program's alums.

During her intern year, Hoffmann served as an assistant director for a formidable lineup of directors that included Aaron Posner, Joseph Hanreddy, J.R. Sullivan and Mark Clements. After completing her internship, Hoffmann spent two years as the Rep's education coordinator; she recently started a new position at the Rep as literary coordinator.

As with UPROOTED for Johnson and Youngblood for Cotey, the Rep gave Hoffmann a base, offering her directing opportunities through its annual Rep Lab of short plays and providing her with ready and constant access to Milwaukee's theater community.

The most recent result was a busy summer, which began with Hoffman directing a Rich Orloff play as part of the Pink Banana One-Act festival in June and ended with her direction of Margaret Atwood's "The Penelopiad" under the Holton Street viaduct in August. The meat in this sandwich was her direction in July of Alchemist Theatre's "King Lear," starring veteran actor Bo Johnson.

As Hoffmann approached "Lear," she was acutely aware that she was going in as a young director who would be asking for trust — from a large cast with which she had almost no prior history — as they worked through a prodigiously difficult play.

"I had fifteen new relationships to build," Hoffmann reflected, during an interview at the Rep. "With every single actor I gave a note to during the first week of rehearsal, I had to figure out when and how such a note might be effective, both in terms of actually helping the actor and in terms of building trust."

Even before rehearsals began, Hoffmann had numerous conversations with Bo Johnson — not just about how he saw his role, but also about how he saw "Lear" as a whole. "I wanted his experience," Hoffmann said. "It was an asset."

Alchemist artistic director Aaron Kopec liked enough of what he saw — in both the production and Hoffmann's interactions with the cast — to invite her back; she'll be directing a production of Eugène Ionesco's "The Chairs" at Alchemist in February. Based on her inventive use of the outdoor space in which she staged "The Penelopiad," Hoffmann has also been asked to direct Door Shakespeare's outdoor production of "The Comedy of Errors" next summer.

Hoffmann nevertheless acknowledges that finding work as a freelance director can be daunting.

"Starting out as a freelancing artist means that every time you do a show will affect whether you work again. At times it made this past summer nerve-wracking, because if people hadn't liked my work, where would I be?"

With her summer's work having been well received and now behind her, it's become easier for Hoffmann to think instead about where she actually is.

"I feel surrounded by a very supportive network of people," Hoffmann said. "There's been a lot of unofficial mentoring, from established artists here who are starting to feel like peers that I trust and can talk to."

None of which would surprise a native and lifer like Rhode.

"Milwaukee's theater community is really special," Rhode said. "There a sense of community here I value so highly, and I love that we're able to share it with visiting artists as well as up-and-coming artists. I'm a product of what this community has to offer and give artists. I've been really nurtured here."

"I love Milwaukee, and I want theater to thrive here," echoed Wright. "I'm getting older, and I want to pass the baton on. I truly want to give directing jobs to people who will take it to another level."

E-mail Newsletter

Keep up with the art scene and trends in urban design with art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher. Every week, you'll get the latest reviews, musings on architecture and her picks for what to do on the weekends.

E-mail Newsletter

Keep up with the art scene and trends in urban design with art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher. Every week, you'll get the latest reviews, musings on architecture and her picks for what to do on the weekends.